What it’s not......

Science

Order

Reason

Categorised

Rationality

Definable

The Truth

Grand Narratives

What it could be....

ChaosSpiritualAnarchicStarry eyedHypocriticalInnovativeMass mediaCriticalUse of signsUnexplainablePopular CultureChallengingConsumption

What it is......

Relative

Personal truth

Postmodernism = the idea that there is no ‘truth’ only interpretations, and all interpretations are socially constructed ( e.g. by elites to exploit groups)

Where Modernism was

Routine

Restrictive

Predictive

Constraining

Narrow minded

Unforgiving

Determinism

Postmodernism is

Spontaneous

Eclectic

In your face

Mixing it up

‘anything’s possible’

Drift

Guy Debord’s ‘Drift’

Dérive App Eduardo Cachucho

SERENDIPITOR

• It has been said that postmodernism could be described as a collage, where meanings can be found in combinations of already created patterns

• Themes of Nostalgia and Displacement due to the fragmentary nature of the postmodern condition

• Media & culture theory:

where once the mirror reflected

society, now only the mirror remains

Music and simulacra – Jean Baudrillard.

Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulations, the first to third stages are variations upon an 'appearance', whilst in the fourth stage 'it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.'

Stage one's concept of 'real' is based on an appearance, whereas the fourth stage's hyper real presents the removing of this 'appearance' - this generic content - and showing moments of trueness, or as Baudrillard refers to them, 'simulacra'.

“minimal, faux-automated movement paired with man-made but also automated music. Humans create a machine (synthesizer). Humans then play the machine, which can also play itself. Within the synthesizer, a musical instrument, lies the singular point of man-machine synthesis”.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/181871/kraftwerk-and-simulacra-a-review-of-the-3d-techno-pop-moma-performance/

Baudrillard – modern rap – disassociated from the core/cause of the genre

Music

Displacement and Nostalgia

NIRVANA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg

Ritalin kids: Kurt & Courtney both prescribed Ritalin as children

“When you’re a kid and you get this drug

that makes you feel that feeling, where else

are you going to turn when you’re an adult?”

Music

Illuminati Mind Kontrolle?

Telephone

• "By 'kinda busy', Gaga means she has dissociated from reality.

• Real life is calling her brain but she 'has no service', she's not there.

• Gaga is not thinking or talking for herself anymore, her head and her heart have been dissociated from her core personality due to [Illuminati/CIA] Monarch programming

• Many signs in the video which refer to popular films (e.g. Thelma & Louise, Kill Bill), also Minnie mouse references with sunglasses as a reference to MK training where Disney films were used.

• Telephone is continuation of Paparazzi; mind controlled drones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgpQzLPWiKY

Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal[1] human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence.

Gaga’s poisoned honey : does this represent the Illuminati elite poisoning the masses with toxic media?

BETA. Referred to as “sexual” programming. This programming eliminates all learned moral convictions and stimulates the primitive sexual instinct, devoid of inhibitions. “Cat” alters may come out at this level.

-Ron Patton, Project Monarch

What is the fascination with the past???

A Cherry-picked, romanticised simulation of reality

DOWNTON Abbey 11.4m

...Call The Midwife's 11.3m

Fredric Jameson suggests that media reveals "the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past.“, and that there are "celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past“.

“The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future became outmoded, while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion”

Nostalgia: the longing of a place, but also a longing for a time past that, except through reminders, one can never return to.

‘...it’s Vintage darling....’Jean Baudrillard

Marcel Proust : Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought –i.e. the ways in which sensory stimuli have power to invoke strong feelings and vivid memories of the past.....precisely the nostalgic feelings that faux-vintage photos seek to invoke.

These are all simulations attempting to make people nostalgic for a time past. Consistent with Baudrillard’s description of simulations, photos in their instagram form have become more vintage than vintage; they exaggerate the qualities of the idea of what it is to be vintage.

“nostalgia for the present”

Authenticity

The very thing that a faux-vintage photo provides, is negated by the fact that it is a simulation......“the vintage” “the idea of the vintage,”

All hyper-real versions of something else and all quite capable of causing and exploiting feelings of nostalgia. Therefore, simply being aware that the authenticity instagram provides is simulated does disqualify the faux-vintage photo from entering into the economy of the real and authentic.

“nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely recyclable past” Svetlana Boym

Hyper-vintage / Hyper-real: Baudrillard

nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely recyclable past

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html

Susan Stewart's provocative study, On Longing suggestively calls nostalgia a "social disease," defining it as "the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition."

Nostalgia cont.....

:the act of photographing, glorifying, and being aroused by wreckage and abandoned

buildings--is a new form of pornography.

Detroit is a goldmine for Decay Pornographers such as Hemmerle. And if one

of Detroit's main attractions is super-sexy broken windows and bikini waxed

buildings, stripped of everything they once had brings people to the city, then more

power to it.

........... ...Decay Porn

“Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex.” Eagleton

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, image from “The Ruins of Detroit” (2005- )

Photographer Andrew Moore notes that there’s “something about mortality” in the choice to depict ruins.

Laboratory-Cass Technical High School, Detroit

When a collective of Detroit artists calling itself Object Orange started painting some of the city’s 7,000 abandoned and dilapidated buildings bright orange, they meant to bring beauty to decay.

When four of the original eleven painted houses were quickly demolished by the city, the group’s endeavor turned to raising awareness about the hazardous conditions associated with blight: low morale, depressed property values, and crime.

This ongoing project, dubbed Detroit, Demolition, Disneyland (the latter referring to the paint, from Behr’s Disney Color series) has evolved into a call to action, with the group declaring, “These buildings aren’t scenery. Don’t look through them…Pick up a roller.”

Object OrangeDemolition, Disneyland, Detroit, Michigan

THEORY

Modernist thinkers like Alex Callinicos and Jurgen Habermas argue that Lyotard'sdescription of the postmodern world as containing an "incredulity toward metanarratives" could be seen as a metanarrative in itself.

Theory is not a %-age, Theory is not quantifiable or measurable. Theory is a deeply Hysterical and profound love and experience of beauty and Hope

Authentic theory is born through the soul, free-associated dreams of Hope, and rebirth from tragedy – given form through a beautiful, sculpted language.

Modern nostalgia

is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an “enchanted world” with clear borders and values. It could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, for a home that is both physical and spiritual, for the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee.

Economic reflections

“In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global village, there is a global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.”

Conclusion

- Which items can you think of that people use, which have a nostalgic edge to them:

i.e. fountain pen

-What feelings does using instagram invoke in yourself – are we not happy with the here and now? Do we need to filter it?

-Do we think that it is ‘the mass’ that yearn for nostalgia, or is it the media that feed it to us?

-Is nostalgia a ‘social disease’?

Question

http://rescuedetroit.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/decay-porn-and-urban-spelunking-baby.html

http://vive-le-rock.deviantart.com/art/courtney-love-54686454

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Jean+Baudrillard+Art&view=detail&id= 5FF418A46BA95CE7286859C176192E6C69A91FAC&first=61&FORM=IDFRIR

http://dmistudio.org/seminar/?p=300

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/mondrian/comp-10.jpg

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.htm

http://classweb.gmu.edu/bhawk/101/semiotics/baud.html

http://www.iasc-culture.org/eNews/2007_10/9.2CBoym.pdf

http://www.virginholidayscruises.co.uk/ncl/pride-of-america/public.php

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=disney+main+street&um= 1&hl=en&sa=N&rlz=1C1AFAB_enGB443&biw=1536&bih=770&tbm=isch&tbnid=O8yrj5aKOyI86M:&imgrefurl=http://livinginagrownupworld.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/disneyworld-vs-disneyland-whatsthedifference/&docid=DiIMr10dr9_xTM&imgurl=http://livinginagrownupworld.files.wordpress.com/ 2012/01/cinderalla1.jpg&w=1936&h=1296&ei=wBxUPi9Aeme0QXzv4GQDw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=167&vpy=181&dur=2700&hovh=183&hovw=274&tx=187&ty=99&sig=102834640020069948899&page=2&tbnh=132&tbnw=169&start=28&ndsp=35&ved=1t:429,r:7,s:28,i:189

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html

http://www.indielondon.co.uk/TV-Review/downton-abbey-is-2012-s-most-watched-tv-drama

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/epsteinlab/pdfs/Epstein_2004_Consciousness,_art,_and_the_brain_Lessons_from_Ma.pdf

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=mirror+house&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1C1AFAB_enGB443&biw=1536&bih=822&tbm=isch&tbnid=375hqq4ycbpgnM:&imgrefurl=http://www.ignant.de/2012/06/06/mirror-house-2/&docid=oLvUBPsx-5J1HM&imgurl=http://www.ignant.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/mirrorhouse_01.jpg&w=720&h=462&ei=5gxyUKflJoWx0QXWlYDoDw&zoom=1&iact=hc&dur=1155&sig=102834640020069948899&page=1&tbnh=150&tbnw=201&start=0&ndsp=28&ved=1t:429,r:8,s:0,i:93&tx=144&ty=144&vpx=394&vpy=316&hovh=180&hovw=279

http://vigilantcitizen.com/musicbusiness/the-hidden-meaning-of-lady-gagas-telephone/

http://www.jahsonic.com/Simulacrum.html

Bibliography